In our Buddhist community, at the invitation of our local XR group, we dedicate one practice session each month to the living earth. In our most recent session I talked about and made a space for grief, and I’ll share some of those same thoughts here.
I remember a childhood holiday to Cornwall. We drove down from the West Midlands in our blue-grey Lada and at the end of the journey, after we had set up camp, my dad washed the car windscreen. We had hit so many bugs on the way down, and their splattered bodies were spread across the glass. Last year I drove to Scotland and the windscreen was almost clear.
People older than me might remember having to pull over to
wash the windscreen on long journeys, or the moth ‘snowstorm’ that appeared in
the headlights of cars driving at night.
You will have your own experiences of the loss: how you used
to be woken up the dawn chorus as a child, but now the early mornings are much
quieter; a favourite wild place that has been built over; or the loss of people
and places to extreme weather events.
I am moved as I write about and name these events. I can feel tears and grief in my stomach wanting to rise up and find expression.
We often shy away from feeling such powerful emotions out of fear that they will overwhelm us. Not wanting to feel this pain is completely understandable, and this denial can prevent us from taking action to support of the living planet.
Understanding our own reluctance to feel grief can allow us
to understand why others don’t want to feel this grief and why they don’t take
the action we might like them to take.
A Second Kind of Grief
I am a child of the 80s and 90s. We were promised endless
material wealth, if only we would work hard. We were fed endless material
dreams:
“Get this, buy this, things will make you happy!”
“When you grow up you can choose to spend your
money however you want.”
“Travel the world!”
I recently looked into my heart and found a place that grieves for not getting what it wants. A small boy who still wants those promises to be fulfilled, “But you told me I could!” he cries. When I first discovered this about myself I was ashamed. These are not the feelings of a conscientious person. And yet, the feelings we have are the feelings we have. I have found a way to be kind to that part of me, and to allow its grief to find expression.
Again, understanding these places in our own hearts allows
us to more deeply understand those others.
Expressing Grief
It’s important to find places to express grief; to find ways of allowing the pain to exist which aren’t overwhelming. When we can acknowledge our deep feelings — anger, blame, hurt and sadness —we allow them to move and shift and change. They become a source of strength rather than a source of fear.
What is it that allows us to process and experience our own
grief? It is love.
For me, much of that love comes from my Buddhist faith.
Knowing that I am loved and supported by the cosmic Buddhas returns me to a
feeling of safety, where I can name and feel powerful feelings without being consumed,
overwhelmed or traumatised.
Some of you will have religious higher powers that you can
take refuge in like this: God, the Tao, Krishna and so on.
Some of you will have loving communities and relationships
where you find this same kind of love. A love that accepts you just as you are.
Some of you will intuit something loving in the natural
world: watching a sunset, being in wilderness, looking up at the night sky.
Some of you will find a place inside yourselves that unconditionally
loves and accepts yourself and others.
Some of you might find it in professional therapeutic relationships.
Some of you might still be searching for this.
As we find safe spaces to grieve we come to know ourselves
more deeply. We discover our pain, and
our resistance to pain. We come to know the human condition more deeply.
This knowing is essential for our work in relationship to
others. As we process our own deep feelings it is easier to come into
relationship to the deep feelings of others, and to find ways of standing
together.
And as we find ways of letting grief in, we come into a more
intimate relationship with the natural world and are more able to celebrate and
champion the diversity and life that still flourishes.
I encourage you to find spaces to grieve in, and to support the grieving process of others. That can only be good for us, and for the living planet.
You can hear a lot about selflessness in psychological and spiritual circles “just do what is needed for the other person” or “selflessness means putting your own feelings aside”.
There is a danger in all of this that we disappear. Not in the good way that the ‘extinguishing’ of nirvana implies, but that we hide ourselves away deep in the shadow because we don’t fit the image of spiritual behaviour that is vaunted in our communities.
We feel something negative, and quickly supress it and lock it away.
In Sunday school we used to sing, “Envy, jealousy, malice, pride – they must never in my heart abide.” I was having all of these feelings. There was no permission to feel them – so away they went. Slowly, I got smaller and smaller. But this was the smallness of a black hole, massively dense.
Where do these dangerous ideals come from? I think spiritually mature people often do put their own feelings to one side, they genuinely let go of resentment, if it arises at all. Dwelling in faith and gratitude they look like these descriptions of saints that are given to us.
I’m just not sure pretending to be a saint really works.
It doesn’t work for the person pretending because all of that supressed stuff has to come out sometime, somewhere. And it doesn’t work for the people around them because real spiritual maturity and personal growth comes out of being in relationship with a real person.
A person who is at ease with themselves has access to all sorts of responses and reactions, they can be creative, spontaneous and lively, and they retain their own character. A person who is at ease with themselves can be genuinely adaptable and flexible. A person who is at ease with themselves accepts encounter and conflict and difference as part of the complex pattern of life.
We might call such a person fully alive.
Being in relationship to a person who is fully alive allows us to find our own edges, and to experience joy and playfulness. It is the perfect condition for becoming fully alive ourselves.
In my spiritual practice, I call people who are fully alive Buddhas. In my therapy practice, I would say the more fully alive the therapist, the better, and also that therapy is relational: in a good therapy session both the client and the therapist become more fully alive.
It was Thursday evening. I was still recovering from a heavy cold. It had lodged itself in my chest, and although my head was clear and my voice returned I had developed a cough which a friend euphemistically called ‘productive’…
I was tired from the virus, and from a busy, long weekend in which we hosted twenty something people for our annual Bodhi gathering: four days of practice, teaching, ceremony and digging cars out of the snowy car park.
I was sorting through the day’s post when I saw my new bank card. I signed the back, and following the instructions reached for the scissors to cut the old one up. The first cut went well – clean through the card. The second cut went less well – I sliced in to my thumb.
It was a new experience. I’d never cut into my own thumb with scissors before.
It’s healing nicely now.
When I showed off the wound on Saturday, after leading our Buddhist practice session, Alex asked me how it happened.
“I was cutting my old debit card and I was tired”, I said.
“Why would you do that if you were tired?” he asked.
Good question.
I think the answer is the reason that gets us into trouble most often: because I thought I was something other than I was.
I thought I was more awake than I was, and I suffered the consequences. When we think that we are better, or worse than we are we act in ways that are likely to have unforeseen, negative, consequences.
It’s this same thought that traps us in guilt as well. After the mistake we still keep trying to pretend we’re not the sort of person who would have done that, and yet we did do it.
Being a person is hard sometimes. We are not always the person that we want to be. We are more frail, or tired, or less skilled than we would like (or sometimes we are more capable than feels comfortable). It is in the gap between how we see ourselves and how we actually are that all sorts of difficulties appear.
A great deal of therapy and spiritual practice is about closing this gap, and coming to terms with what it means to be human.
Sometimes we are loving, kind creative and produce wonderful things. Sometimes we cut into our thumbs.
Late afternoon on Friday. The sun had already dipped behind the hills leaving the temple and garden in shadow, but the wide Severn valley and the distant hills of the Cotswolds were lit in a dusky gold light.
I glimpsed the view, a picture of stillness, through the grubby window of one of our guest rooms. I was preparing the room for an old resident who is visiting next week. When I had arrived in the space, carrying the vacuum cleaner and other cleaning supplies, I was thinking more about myself than the guest, “Could I get the room ready today” I wondered, “to give myself a clear day tomorrow?”
As I moved the furniture around, pushing a spare bed from the store room down the corridor and into the room, carrying in some bedside cabinets that weren’t being used anywhere else and taking out some of the strange collections of shelves and tables that had accumulated in the room, I noticed my state of mind changing.
I had stopped thinking about myself, and started to think about the well-being of the coming guests.
The work had become an offering.
All good work, and even play time, or chilling out time, can be an offering if it is done in the right spirit, and doing it in the right spirit transforms our experience of it.
As I polished and cleaned I relaxed into the work. Thinking about the wellbeing of our guests I began to enjoy preparing the room, rather than thinking of what I might have been doing instead.
As the work became an offering my spirits lifted.
I also became aware of how it is my ordinary human selfishness that keeps me out of that state. The greed, hate and delusion that is a frequent reaction to my own sense of lack, my insecurities and my faithlessness keep me out of the ‘offering’ state of mind.
How can we move from one state of mind to the other? A number of things help me: remembering that the offering state of mind is not something to be resented, but is a more satisfying way of being in the world; letting myself become aware of the vulnerability underneath the greed, hate and delusion makes making a wise choice easier; slowly developing faith in a selfless way of being in the world, through trying it out and experimenting with setting good intentions; and deepening my religious faith which directly addresses the insecurities and fears which keep me selfish.
Whilst thinking about this transformation is important, more important (or more profound, perhaps) is the tenderness that arises when I see the human condition clearly: that there is the possibility of selflessness, and there is human foolishness and vulnerability which keeps us from inhabiting that selflesness. And, for me, that tenderness is supported by remembering that there are Buddhas who do embody that selflessness and that I – a foolish being – can recieve their offerings regardless of how well I make my own.
The clouds are mostly just grey today; a flat sky that only gives up its colour and texture under close examination.
I woke up at eight, to the sound of our oldest cat mewing for breakfast. I shuffled through the dark flat, fed him, and the girl cat scurrying after us, and went back to bed.
I woke up again an hour later, full of a pale wash of feeling: sadness, disappointment, tenderness, hope, love.
The temple felt quiet. Our Buddhist teacher, who had been staying with us for 10 days, had gone home yesterday; the guests we had invited for his surprise birthday party had gone as well.
He is seventy years old. While he was here visiting us, he sprained his knee walking on the hills. I took him to the minor injuries clinic on Thursday morning, and they checked him out, strapped him up, gave him some painkillers and crutches and told him to rest.
On Friday morning his cat (travelling with him) got into a scrap with one of ours and came away with a scratched eye. A friend drove them both to the vet. The cat came away with antibiotics and anti-inflammatories and will be okay. On Saturday she was sniffing around our cats again. We closed the door between them.
There was a lot of love on display at the birthday party. A lot of cake was eaten. Seven people helped out making party food in the kitchen. We all spoke of our deep gratitude to our teacher.
This morning I have found a thread of romanticism in my soul, and I am letting it go.
I first met Buddhism through stories of monks and nuns staying cool under pressure, gliding through life easily, seeing things that I couldn’t see. I enjoyed hearing stories about the mystical land of the snows, and the great sages hidden there.
I was sceptical about the magic, and sometimes frustrated by the mystical language which seemed to cover up the truth as much as reveal it, and yet part of me hoped that there was a place where old monks floated up into the sky to give teachings, and where suffering was eased.
My practice does give me consolation, but it is consolation in the midst of suffering, consolation in the midst of a world which falls apart.
Dharmavidya, my teacher, says that the Buddha’s first noble truth of suffering is a truth for noble ones. The first activity of sages is to pay attention to suffering. To know the world as it falls apart.
I was refreshed when I first heard this, and it refreshes me today, as I find thin threads of false hope, wishing the world was different, in my heart.
On the top floor of the temple is a long, high ceilinged hallway between the residents bedrooms. The carpet is a mottled beige, worn down the centre. Dim lightbulbs hang from long cords in paper lampshades.
Just as you go into the hallway, look up, and you will see a stain on the ceiling and high up on the wall. It looks damp. The thick wallpaper is curled up at the edges. Salt crystals have formed along one edge of the dark stain.
When I pressed my hand up against it a year ago it didn’t feel damp. Sometimes I think it has grown, sometimes I’m not sure. I like to believe it hasn’t, because that would excuse my not having done anything about it.
Mostly, I don’t think about it at all.
I asked the guys who repaired our roof and chimneys to take a look while they were here. They didn’t, and I didn’t ask them again. Sometimes I manage to chase builders, but I have to work myself up to it, stirring up some frustration to fuel going outside my comfort zone. Sometimes I don’t manage to.
One day, while the chimneys were being repaired, I went for a walk with some friends. It was a cold, bright day and we walked to the White Leaved Oak, an old tree of local legend. When we returned home, Jnanamati spotted us and warned us there were six builders cleaning our flat.
I had blocked off the fireplace a few days earlier, when dust had started coming down in to it, but that morning a chunk of brick had broken through my makeshift barrier: clouds of ash and brick dust had exploded into the flat. The fire alarm had gone off, the cats had fled, and it had made a mess.
One builder was mopping the floor, another cleaning our kitchen area. Most of our books survived, but some didn’t.
A few days after the explosion I looked at the wall next to our small dining table. It is rough hewn granite, painted over many times in white (behind the wall, the hillside). I couldn’t make any sense of what I was seeing. The shadows were all wrong: upside-down. After a moment of confusion, I rubbed my finger through one of the shadows, resting on top of one of the white stones: ash and brickdust.
Sometimes I get a little closer to changing when I notice the things which I find difficult. Sometimes I don’t. Pure awareness is not always (not often?) enough. I read a Sylvia Boorstein quote about meditation today:
Mindfulness meditation doesn’t change life. Life remains as fragile and unpredictable as ever. Meditation changes the heart’s capacity to accept life as it is.
Perhaps we can also say that meditation doesn’t change us either, or at least not in the ways we sometimes hope for. We remain as fragile and unpredictable as ever, but move towards accepting our fragile and unpredictable state.
When I see myself shying away from calling the builders I can react with tenderness, rather than with harshness. And that must be a move towards the good, even if the stain remains.
Inkstain by Max Stanworth shared under a a Creative Commons license (CC BY 2.0)
Suzuki Roshi was once asked if anything was constant in this life. He replied with one word: change.
A couple of weeks ago I watched a wave of hail moving from behind the hills, over the temple and through the valley. Directly above my office, directly above my writing desk, is the dining room balcony. Drum-rolls of hard ice falling onto the flat surface of the balcony roused me from my concentration. I went upstairs to watch the weather.
A few days earlier it had felt like summer had arrived. The sunshine was bright, and the air was warm. It was a real change from the sun and cold wind of winter and spring days. The sun-rose in the garden started to flower. Each delicate, Barbie-pink, flower lasts for just one day.
On my day off, I was looking forward to a day in the heat. I sat in the garden eating breakfast, looking out over the copper-beech, with its orange-yellow blossom, and the plum tree just coming into leaf. Grey clouds drifted in, settling over the sky like a soft blanket. Still, I spent most of the day outside.
In the evening it started to rain. Noisy rain. The cats ran inside, mewing at us, complaining about the weather. I could hear the water from the roof flooding down the downspout and overwhelming the drains. It rained hard through the night. The following morning it eased a little. The rain drops were smaller and softer. More like mist than rain. The slate tiles of the coach house roof I can see from my office window were dark with the wet.
It’s tempting to complain about the rain, and praise the sunshine. But they are each beautiful in their own way. Someone was decorating our shrine room on those wet mornings. It wasn’t ideal conditions, the light was dim, and the paint took longer to dry, but the garden loved the rain. The potatoes plants doubled in size in a couple of days, and the cucumber seedling I planted out on my day off grew taller by an inch a day.
The summer colours were dulled a little by the mist, but still the deep pink magnolia flowers burst from the grey.
If we can just find the right place to stand, all weather is beautiful weather. And all weather changes. The same is true of our own lives.
There are large changes that a life goes through, and we might have some sense of what they are: of how the energy of a life shifts from childhood, through the teenager years to adulthood and old age. Having some sense of this can bring us a kind of solace, we can make peace with knowing that one thing changes into another. But we shouldn’t hold on to tightly to this idea of cycles. Just like the weather there can be unexpected storms in the summer, or days of sunshine in the winter.
Thoughts, feelings, our physical health, all of these change over the years, and all of these change on a daily basis, and all of these change from moment to moment.
The simple act of knowing this can bring us to a calm centre point.
We can’t control man, if any, of these circumstances. But, like the weather, we can change how we look at them, and how we experience them.
In every circumstance there is something beautiful, and every circumstance is always beginning to change into something new.
Yesterday afternoon I was tired, and I was grumpy. I was upset with someone for not having behaved how I wanted them too, or how I thought I would have behaved in their situation. I worked over the situation in my mind. I was justifying my upset feelings to myself, but of course this just kept the frustration alive.
I watched the rain running down the window as I did the washing up after lunch. The view across the valley was obscured by a fine grey mist.
Somehow I managed to catch sight of what I was doing: I was resisting reality. I couldn’t change what had happened, and every time I went over events in my mind I was getting more upset. I was pitting what I wanted against what had actually taken place and, naturally, reality won out.
We create a huge amount of pain for ourselves by resisting reality. We’ll all have our own style of doing this, and different styles at different times. Perhaps we distract ourselves by opening a bottle of wine; or reaching for another chocolate; or ordering a new pair of shoes, or that latest collectable online. Perhaps we’ll try to push reality away, getting upset with other people, or inanimate objects. Often anger is an attempt to create distance between us and something unsettling. Perhaps we’ll simply try to pretend that what we don’t like isn’t there, and become exhausted or even depressed as it takes all of our energy to hold reality at bay.
When I was stood at the sink, as soon as I noticed what my mind had been doing my tiredness started to lift. I felt awake again. As I had started to accept reality the energy that I’d been putting into railing against it, or just ignoring it, was suddenly available for other uses.
Along with giving us some energy back, accepting what is means that we can then give ourselves options: the more we resist reality the less options we have.
With my hands in hot water, washing the dishes, I not only saw the choices my friend had made that had upset me, but also saw his reasons for making those choices. I was also able to see the version of reality that I was trying to protect, and that it was simply a misplaced expectation.
Once I had seen more of what was real I was able to sit down with my friend and talk over what had happened in a pretty relaxed way.
One common thing that affects how well we are able to accept reality is a confusion between things that are inside our control and things that are outside our control. I couldn’t change what had happened, or my friend, but I could change my response. Many situations that we struggle with are like this, and thinking clearly about what is and isn’t in our control can help us move towards acceptance and creating options.
There’s a simple exercise I use sometimes to help with this. I create three columns in my journal, the first for elements within my control, the second for elements I can influence, and the third for things completely outside my control. Then I fill in the blanks.
Anything that brings us closer to seeing what is really there is a good thing. The more clearly we can see, and accept what is in front of us, the more likely we are to be at ease with what is happening and to make a good response.
Over the Christmas break a book review appeared on Amazon.com that amused me. It was a review of mine and Satya’s book Just As You Are: Buddhism for Foolish Beings. It was a three star review, which I thought that was pretty generous, considering what the reviewer had to say…
I’m not sure I could read this book though I’m making an assessment from one sentence. “… he created community based on rituals, precepts, and dogma.” The Buddha was so against dogma that he gave a teaching called the Kalama Sutra, in which he said to question even what he had to say.
I think that might be from the introduction, or perhaps it’s from the chapter I wrote called Buddhism is a Religion, in which I quote David L. Mcmahan. Mcmahan deliberately uses the word dogma about Buddhism, in contrast to Anagarika Dharmapala who in the 1893 World’s Fair, described Buddhism as ‘free from theology, priestcraft, rituals, ceremonies, dogmas, heavens, hells and other theological shibboleths.’
David L. McMahan comments that ‘even a cursory knowledge of Sinhalese Buddhism on the ground belies Dharmapala’s characterization of Buddhism as free from ritual, priests, ceremonies, heavens and hells; yet this sentiment is often repeated by early apologists and its echo continues today.’[1]
Why did Dharmapala describe Buddhism in that way? To appeal to rational westerners and garner their support for Buddhism in Celyon, which he felt was becoming threatened by Christian missionaries.
That’s an aside really. The reason for writing this post was to give me an excuse to go back and re-read the Kalama Sutta. I know from past readings that it doesn’t really suggest cherry picking the bits of Buddhism you like, and leaving the rest (as it’s often used by westerners), but I wanted to see what it really says. (more…)
You can hear a lot about selflessness in psychological and spiritual circles “just do what is needed for the other person” or “selflessness means putting your own feelings aside”.
Late afternoon on Friday. The sun had already dipped behind the hills leaving the temple and garden in shadow, but the wide Severn valley and the distant hills of the Cotswolds were lit in a dusky gold light.
The clouds are mostly just grey today; a flat sky that only gives up its colour and texture under close examination.
On the top floor of the temple is a long, high ceilinged hallway between the residents bedrooms. The carpet is a mottled beige, worn down the centre. Dim lightbulbs hang from long cords in paper lampshades.
